The Great Century of Missions

The Great Century of Missions refers chiefly to the foreign missions of Protestantism between 1800 and 1914. The term comes from A History of the Expansion of Christianity, published in the early 1940s by Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884–1968), a church historian at Yale University. Latourette titled volumes 4 through 6, which cover the years 1800–1914, "The Great Century."

Background

In the eighteenth century, the foreign missions of the Roman Catholic Church declined for several reasons. The Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773; the Rites Controversy arose over how far traditional rituals in mission fields should be tolerated; and the Enlightenment also exerted its influence. In the nineteenth century, advances in transportation and communication, the Industrial Revolution, optimism about progress, and Western colonial expansion converged. Together these created conditions favorable to the widespread expansion of Protestant missions.

Development

• 1792: The English Baptist minister William Carey published a pamphlet urging missionary work, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. In October of the same year, the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) was founded. Carey went to India the following year and devoted himself to Bible translation and education.
• 1795–1815: A succession of organizations was founded, including the London Missionary Society (1795), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), and the Basel Mission (1815).
• 1806: Five students at Williams College in the United States prayed for foreign missions beside a haystack. This gathering is known as the "Haystack Prayer Meeting."
• 1810: These students played a leading role in founding the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the first foreign mission organization in North America. In 1812 the board sent Adoniram Judson and others to India, and in its first fifty years it sent out more than 1,200 missionaries.
• 1886–1888: At a college student conference held by Dwight L. Moody at Mount Hermon, one hundred students pledged themselves to foreign missions. This movement gave rise to the organization known as the Student Volunteer Movement. John R. Mott served as its chairman, and "The evangelization of the world in this generation" became its watchword.
• 1910: The Edinburgh Missionary Conference was held to review the missions of the nineteenth century. The conference is regarded as the starting point of twentieth-century missions.

Results and Influence

Over the course of this period, Christianity became a world religion present on nearly every continent. Latourette held that no religion, Christianity included, had ever before spread over so wide an area in a period of comparable length. Leadership of the missionary enterprise gradually shifted from Europe to the United States.

Korean Protestantism is also understood as a fruit of this movement. In 1832 Karl Gützlaff of the Netherlands Missionary Society visited Baengnyeong Island and other places in Korea, and Robert Jermain Thomas of the London Missionary Society was martyred in Joseon-era Korea. Among Latourette's students was the Korean scholar L. George Paik.

Assessment

• Relationship with colonialism: The missiologist Kim Eun-soo has critically analyzed the view of mission expressed at the Edinburgh conference, arguing that it revealed an imperialistic and one-sided perspective in which the West would conquer the non-Western world with the gospel. Related discussion can be found in the article Colonialism and Missions.
• Excessive optimism: The German missiologist Gustav Warneck regarded the watchword of the Student Volunteer Movement as arrogant and superficial, since he read it as a claim that the whole world would soon be Christianized. Defenders of the movement countered that the critics had misunderstood the watchword's true meaning.
• Which century is "great"?: The church historian Lee Jae-keun has offered a different perspective, arguing that the twentieth century, during which the center of Christianity shifted to the non-Western world, is the true "Great Century."